How To Manage and Sort Your Mail

Like many of you, we like to take care of and sort our mail first thing when we come home. But sometimes we are too tired or busy to get around to it for a couple of days. It was after our pile built up to an embarrassing height that we developed our system with handy accessories.

Instructions

2. If you're often too tired or busy to sort it every day, have a drop-off area in a convenient location. Our hallway is too skinny for landing strip table, so we have this tray on our dryer in our kitchen.

3. When you do have time to sort mail, do it where you have places to put each category of mail: 1) garbage, 2) recycling, 3) coupons

4. When recycling pieces of mail, make sure to shred your name and address and any other secure information. This also prevents a build-up for an electronic shredder.

5. Put coupons away in a spot that you can easily access the next time you go shopping.

6. At this point, we carry the mail that needs action over to our desk. (As you can see, organizing the wires under the desk is another project on our list.) Postcards, invitations and correspondence can be tacked to our bulletin board.

7. We handle mail that needs urgent action, such as bills, right away. Checkbooks and stamps are stored on the shelf under our desk. The rest of the mail that's not urgent, such as catalogs we'd like to flip through and bank statements, go in a designated box on a shelf. When we have time and energy, or when this box gets too full, we sort through these and file paper away in

8. Mail that needs to be sent out goes by the door in this mail and key holder. When we grab our keys to leave, we grab our mail too.

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